Every day, drug manufacturers and care providers (such as hospitals, pharmacies and clinics) generate surplus or unused prescription medications. These may result from excess production or changes in the needs of a patient population. As a result, much of this excess medication expires and must be destroyed. In California alone, health facilities destroy an estimated $100 million worth of medications each year.
At the same time, health care costs continue to rise. Rising drug costs particularly impact uninsured patients who rely on safety-net clinics. Many of these patients forego medication due to cost. As such, a need exists to increase the supply of inexpensive medications by connecting safety-net clinics with the drug suppliers and dispensers that generate surplus medications. Providing these clinics with surplus medications also reduces the environmental and economic impacts of disposing of surplus medication.
Medication donation programs exist to enable drug suppliers and dispensers to donate their excess medications to clinics and individuals. However, existing models use a distributor as the intermediary between the medication donor and recipient. As the distributor must store donated medications before shipping them to a recipient, maintaining a licensed distributor requires costly overhead charges to ensure drug safety and security while also providing for medication storage and shipping.
Therefore, a need exists for a more efficient medication redistribution model for medication donation. A peer-to-peer model would avoid costly overhead and increase efficiency by directly connecting medication donors and recipients. In order to provide medication donors with the same quality and safety assurances that a distributor typically provides, a need exists for methods of instituting a closed system for peer-to-peer medication redistribution. Such a closed peer-to-peer system would enhance cost efficiency for donation facilitators and recipients while maintaining the proper safety, legal, and security standards that medication donors require.